Where Once I Had Died
by marapozsa
Summary: au. post-game. vayneoriginalcharacter. giftfic. She might once have been an angel, but after death, even an angel must go through a metamorphosis.


**Where Once I Had Died**

a k a n t h a e - h i m e

**Authoress' Note & Disclaimer:** A random one-shot on what might happen in the end of The Last White Angel, if the gang all dies and Vayne actually takes over Ivalice and stuff, and a gift!fic for the author, WinterLoveSong. I doubt the ending will be this angsty, since this has some pretty blatant speculations on rape and stuff, but I liked the plot enough to write something on it. My muse is taking a turn into evil-moody land. I like it better that way.

(Don't own.)

-

Once upon a time, my name was Avriella-Reinix Lentali.

But I carry this name no longer, and yet I am far more aware of who I am than I have ever been, from the minute of my birth to the minute of my death, and from there onto the body of another.

Vayne is a man. That is one of many things I know. He has proved it, and I can no longer accuse him of being a coward...rather, he is faulted for being fearless, and being unafraid of an angel although he does not realize that I am as powerless in this frail new body of mine as I was as a soul waiting for redemption.

Angels can age. This is another, but I know that this is only because I have a Hume's body now, which can be violated and does not come with numerous stores of wealth. My eyes cannot change, either, ever always the same shade of brittle grey. And when I run my hands over my back, or Vayne does and I feel it too, I can feel the bony parts of that arching spine which is mine and yet not mine melt underneath his gaze. Yet no wings emerge, and no white feathers break off from the slits on my arms.

(It is all smooth white skin, save for where other slits - these bleed at times, but I am used to the pain - decorate my arms and the red expanse of welts across my thighs where my skin is crushed underneath the folds of his hands. I cry out at times, but it is all theatrics. I can no longer feel pain.)

And Dalmasca is dying. This, too, has crossed my mind several times, though Vayne has told me not to think of such things. He may control my face, my wings, my hands, but he does not like to acknowledge the fact that he still has no idea what I can do with my thoughts alone. I no longer even have a voice to state these thoughts, yet he does not realize that I have already given up, that the White Angel who is Avriella-Reinix Lentali is blurring on the lines of her identity and cannot distinguish herself from Vayne's whore and second mistress (I do not know who is the first, but I believe that she has already died from his sadistic ways), Lady Emer Quinnae of the House of Death-shrouds.

Such a death-shroud encircles my bedchamber, hiding what goes on underneath the turquoise sheets of satin from prying eyes. Even if they do see, Vayne knows that none will tell, not if they want to live. This imposing man is no longer the one I fear, though he delights in cowing the other soul inside this body, the one called Lady Quinnae by her servants and Vayne's whore by _his_ servants, and there are periods of blank silence in my memory where I have allowed her to take the blunt force of his attacks - sexual, mental, even the spiritual ones where he delights in overloading this human carcass with Mist and watching it writh while he tells his scientists what a dual-souled person can endure, conducting experiments himself rather than let his cronies have all the fun.

I admit, it must seem cowardly to allow this frail soul to wither further when she is all that binds me to this earth. I am kind enough to advise her on courses of action, telling her when she should flinch and when she should feign sleep. Vayne, Emer thinks, not nearly as strong as her name suggests, is a monster. He has no limits.

And at times, I agree with her. We, Emer and I, are nothing to him. If he finds Heaven's Holder someday - as though I can really pretend he has not already, that he is still incapable of ascending to the heavens and confronting the gods himself - then the angels truly will die out. Only the aegyl, who are pale imitations of our glory, will remain. Even then, you could not assume that they would be left untouched. Their sky-city is similar to the humes' copy, floating on Purvama Dorstonis, but the angels call it Ethrell rather than the mortals' name for the place.

I have forgotten as many things as I have learned, probably to make room for new things and to make room for this not-woman who inhabits the same space as I do. This is why I cannot tell you what the mortals' name for their sky-city is, though it is not the name the Mother Wood of the viera has for the place. She calls it a heathen's paradise, she who has ever been a spirit of the earth and knows its thoughts because she is a daughter of this planet, but I laugh at her because though she knows the names of all her children and the names of all the growing things in the world, she does not know her own name because she has always been unchanging. She _cannot_ grow. I laugh at this irony.

Emer is confused when I laugh at things. These occasions often make little to no sense, not as much sense as they did when I still retained some of my former glory.

I laugh at Vayne, you see, silently, whenever he dares enter my - _our_, Emer reminds me - chambers and try in his twisted way to make love to me. No doubt he wants to know what it's like to be the father of an angel, but does he know that his child will be a human? That perhaps I may not give birth at all? And if I die in the process, then the baby will die as well...that is the profound link between child and mother, one that is not found between child and sire. If it survives, the angels will know. They will kill the father, Vayne, in his sleep, or if he does not sleep they will kill the baby.

I care no longer. I am but one of my former selves, a facet of the true Avriella-Reinix's personality, the one that might have made me a woman where I seemed only a child, even compared to Vaan and Penelo, the dancer-girl who is too proud to auction her body for survival as I do.

That is enough for me.

I am too tired, too almost-dead-but-not-quite, to care.


End file.
